- page 2 By Patricia Guthrie - Staff Meditation vs. medication Rising and falling millimeters of mercury in a blood pressure gauge is the quickest way to find out whether the heart is straining too hard. Normal blood pressure should be less than 140/90 for an adult. If it goes above that level and stays there, the condition is called high blood pressure, or hypertension. For the NIH study, a participant must have a blood pressure reading of 130/85 (high normal) or higher. A person with uncontrolled high blood pressure is seven times more likely to have a stroke, six times more likely to develop congestive heart failure and three times more likely to experience coronary heart disease than someone with normal blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association. African-Americans have twice the rate of hypertension as white Americans, with elderly black women showing the highest prevalence among all racial and age groups --- more than 75 percent of them have high blood pressure. Some combination of diet, exercise and medication is the usual treatment. But an estimated 50 percent of patients quit antihyper- tensive medicine after one year, because of unpleasant side effects or for other reasons. Advice regarding diet and exercise also often goes unheeded, as many patients continue to live on fast food or other less than healthy fare. Many doctors acknowledge that alternative therapies are badly needed to treat hypertension and other conditions that lead to premature death. "During TM, the blood flows more easily. . . . It's the opposite of when you're tense and your blood vessels constrict and your heart pumps harder," explains Professor Vernon Barnes of the Medical College of Georgia's Prevention Institute, who has researched TM's effects. "With meditation, it's like you're giving your venous system a chance to regroup and revitalize." Emory Clinic cardiologist Paul Robinson says he suggests TM to patients if they suffer from anxiety. "TM definitely works,'' he declares. ''There's no question about it. But the American public are attached to the quick fix; they want us to give them a pill to take care of whatever's wrong." But Robinson also acknowledges that there's a growing swell of alternative medicine followers, with an estimated 1 million Americans now practicing TM. 'Going to the source' Kondwani, who has master's and doctoral degrees in psychology from the Maharishi University, was wooed away by Morehouse last year from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was completing postdoctoral studies. His role in the Morehouse hypertension studies is to teach participants the principles behind transcendental meditation, then make sure they're practicing their new form of alternative medicine. He also meets with each participant individually to give them their mantra, and then he meditates with each one to give them a chance to ask questions. "It's a restful job, not a stressful job," he says, barely containing a very relaxed smile. "There are some days when I sit with one person in my office and meditate and then the next person comes in and I meditate again." Nothing in Kondwani's dress, office or casual conversation would suggest that he has been a follower of TM since discovering it as a GI Joe in the Army in Korea in the 1970s. No pictures of yogis with flowing beards and turbans on his walls; no love beads of long ago dangling from his computer. "I learned TM and then I started sleeping better, having a better memory and I just seemed happier,'' says Kondwani, 44, who lives in Stone Mountain with his wife and 7-year-old son. "I thought, 'If it can do all of this and I'm not really even trying that hard at it, there must be something to it.'" Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. Further reproduction, retransmission or distribution of these materials without the prior written consent of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, and any copyright holder identified in the material's copyright notice, is prohibited. |
